StewArt Media wins battle to keep domain

StewArt Media has won a last-minute victory in his battle to stop his domain name from being deregistered by policy authority auDA.

The auDA’s Registrants Review Panel (RRP), StewArt Media’s final avenue of appeal, has found in favour of the company, stating that auDA CEO Cameron Boardman had erred in his interpretation of the registrar’s policy.

The deregistration was planned in response to an anonymous complaint against the stewartmedia.com.au domain. Based on this complaint, auDA informed StewArt Media that the domain would be deleted.

StewArt Media CEO Jim Stewart has acknowledged that due to a clerical error the wrong company details were registered against its domain. This error dates back to a failure to update the ABN details lodged against its domain name five years ago.

But he alleged that auDA’s decision was actually motivated by the fact that he has been leading the campaign against the registrar’s new direct registration policy for the .au domain, and seeking sweeping reform of the organisation.

In February, auDA announced that the owner of any .com.au domain registered after April 2016 will not automatically be able to claim the .au version of the domain.

Stewart has alleged that this policy will allow unaffiliated entities to swipe the .au version of domains, which could potentially cause significant financial and brand damage for Australian companies.

auDA was recently forced to put the introduction of direct .au registrations on hold after a federal government review into the operation of Australia’s .au domain registration system found that significant reforms are needed.

“The decision of the RRP clearly demonstrates that auDA do not understand its own policy. Both the membership and the federal government have expressed concern about the lack of practical industry experience within the board level for an organisation that oversees a public asset and critical infrastructure,” Stewart said.

“It’s clear that the government reforms need to be implemented as soon as possible with the right leadership team. The current team are the source of many of the practices that need to be changed, as outlined in the report.”

He said that while winning his appeal with the RRP represents a “David and Goliath” victory, his win came at a cost.

“For a solid week we had staff working around the clock to prepare for the domain deletion. As it affected email accounts going back 20 years as well as hundreds of different logins, they all had to be swapped to stewartmedia.biz,” Stewart said.

“It would have destroyed most other businesses. Just the cost in staff hours and legal fees is well over $100,000. We have not even looked at ‘lost opportunity’ costs.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Edelweiss

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